10 Essential Feminist TV Shows To Watch This Fall

The Good Place, Promotional Image, Credit: NBC

The Good Place – NBC – September 19

The Good Place is a comedy about the afterlife. Eleanor wakes up after being struck by a tractor-trailer to discover that she is in “The Good Place,” an allegory for heaven where everything is wonderful and no one does anything bad. The thing is, she doesn’t belong there. When Eleanor, who was never a lawyer, is told that she is there because she worked to get innocent people off death row when she was alive, she realizes that someone has made a huge mistake.

NBC has given us all the ingredients for a standout feminist show here. The creator, Mike Schur, also created Parks and Recreation, which means he is partially responsible for Our Lady of Perpetual Badassery Leslie Knope. Combined with his work on The Office, Schur holds a pretty strong track record of creating smart, complex, hilarious female characters, and we’re sure Eleanor will be no different. That’s not to mention the fact that Eleanor is played by Kristen Bell, the woman who made Veronica Mars such an empowering character for young women.

Additionally, it looks like Schur and NBC have been very intentional about diverse casting and writing. Of what appear to be the main six characters, only one is a white man. The rest are women, people of color, or both. For a network that has historically produced whitewashed sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld, that’s some pretty great progress.

The Good Place premieres on NBC on September 19

Next: Good Girls Revolt